Wearable computing devices enable various approaches to managing different types of applications where computing power may be utilized to enhance the application. As examples, healthcare and fitness are examples of just a couple of applications that may utilize wearable computing devices.
Some existing wearable computing devices include glasses, bracelets and smart watches. Sometimes the size and/or the shape of a device make it challenging to provide user input give input into a wearable computing device. As examples, smart watches and bracelets may be operated by touch sensitive surfaces on the device or with knobs.
Other wearable computing devices (e.g., glasses) may be difficult to operate using knobs. The user input to glasses may be done by voice-operated commands, hand movement recognition in front of the glasses or eye motion control.
One class of wearable computing devices that is rising in importance relates to textiles which include integrated electronic devices. These wearable computing devices typically require a user interface. In some forms, a touch pad is integrated in the textile to receive user input and/or display data.
One of the challenges with conventional touch pad systems is that they typically require a large number of conductive lines that each needs to be monitored by its own detector. In addition, scaling such touch pads to a larger size means increasing the number of conductive lines and corresponding detectors.
One common type of touch pad relates to capacitive touch pads. Capacitive touch pads are sensitive to a change of dielectric constant in the vicinity of the touch pad. Capacitive touch pads may be incorporated into wearable computing devices that are integrated in textiles meant to be worn on the body.
One of the drawbacks with incorporating capacitive touch pads into textiles meant to be worn on the body is that there may often be strong noise by capacitive interaction with the body of the person wearing the wearable computing device. This strong noise due to capacitive interaction with the body may negatively affect performance of wearable computing device.